Stanczyk made some interesting finds in Salt Lake City, UT a couple of weeks ago. I found multiple Wolvovitz ancestors coming to Philadelphia.

Now I had one of my wife great-uncles (grand-uncles for purists) whose American name was Harry Wolf, but his name had changed from Herman Wolsevitz. So as I prepared my research list (Excel Spreadsheet), I added the microfilm #’s for Philadelphia HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). Now these HIAS microfilm were mainly to find Solomon, but I made a mental note to see if any Wolf were in the list. Imagine my surprise to see Wolvovitz. My brain said not Wolf, but I have seen that name before — so I whipped out my Ancestry App on my iPhone and scanned my family tree for Harry Wolf to see if this matched his name on his Petition for Naturalization. Close.

The cards I found matched enough markers to suggest I may have found my wife’s maternal grandmother’s family. They all agreed on the region they came from … Maramaros … Hungary (and came to Philadelphia). Today that region is called Maramures and depending on the village either Romania or Ukraine. But with shifting borders, it was Hungary (Austro-Hungary), then Czechoslovakia, then Hungary and now either Romania/Ukraine. The villages are so close to the border it may be both Romania & Ukraine. So I did some quick checking of the area to find what kind of Jewish genealogy resources might be available.

Then I find that one of the #RootsTech speakers, a Brooke Ganz, is a lead contact for the Jewish Indexing project in this area. I had just heard her speak on her project called LeafSeek and the underlying Solar/Solarium (open source tools from Apache) technology. The Internet makes this a very small world indeed.

Yep, looks like the guy’s hometown was “Kivesleget” in the images above, which is probably a misspelling of the town “Kovesliget”, which is today the town of Drahovo, Zakarpat’ska [sub-Carpathian] oblast, Ukraine. And yes, as you probably realized, we do have digital photographs of some of the surviving pre-1896 records for the town!